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If the peacekeepers cannot fulfill their mission, why not just remove them? Because that could turn into a real, if hard to define, disaster. "All the governments looked into the pit of withdrawal," says a U.S. State Department official, "and just recoiled from it because that drags you in and leads almost inevitably to some sort of further entanglement." A U.N. pullout might be followed by a lifting of the arms embargo on Bosnia or by further air strikes, so the Serbs would be likely to fire on the departing troops and take hostages. If a pullout is a prelude to abandoning the Bosnians, the Muslims might shoot their betrayers or try to swamp the NATO helicopters in a Balkan replay of the U.S. evacuation of Saigon.
For Clinton, who has pledged as many as 25,000 U.S. ground troops if they are needed to help extricate the peacekeeping force, avoiding that outcome is a policy in itself. "The nightmare behind a lot of these [recent] decisions," says the State Department official, "has been the withdrawal scenarios." Marshall Harris, who quit the State Department two years ago in protest over its Bosnia policy, says, "The Administration is scared out of its wits of a withdrawal -- even to the extent of putting in troops to get unprofor to stay."
With the peacekeepers stuck while the war goes on, the West's only hope is diplomacy, but few see a ready diplomatic solution. At their meeting, the foreign ministers agreed on another attempt to get Milosevic to bring pressure to bear on Bosnian Serb leader Karadzic, his erstwhile protaga, to make peace. Serbia is still under severe U.N.-imposed economic sanctions, and would like to have them lifted, which might happen if Milosevic could persuade Karadzic to negotiate a reasonable settlement with the government of Bosnia. American officials say Milosevic and Karadzic are "mortal enemies," and a diplomat says, "They both realize there's not enough room in the former Yugoslavia for both of them."
The U.S. last week sent special negotiator Robert Frasure to Belgrade to try again to work out a deal with Milosevic. Christopher was frank about what he had in mind: "We want to isolate Karadzic." Specifically, the NATO allies hope to persuade Milosevic to recognize the sovereignty of Bosnia and Croatia, thus giving up, at least for now, his plan for a Greater Serbia. By accepting Bosnia's borders, he would be acquiescing in the breakup of Yugoslavia. The quid pro quo would be to lift some sanctions and allow Serbia to import oil. American diplomats put on a positive face, but they do not expect quick results from the negotiations with Milosevic. They are "not going well," a senior official said Saturday.
At the end of March, the Security Council asked Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to review the mission and suggest changes. The council met on Friday to begin considering his report, which contains four options. The first is early withdrawal, and the second is maintaining the status quo; Boutros-Ghali does not advocate either of those. The fourth calls for a smaller unprofor based in the six safe areas and authorized only to support relief efforts. This is more the classic form of peacekeeping, but it requires that all the warring parties agree to it.